And now… something serious.
Well. Almost serious.
When Dick and Jackie finally left their orbital broadcast station—closing the door with the weary finality of two souls who had spent a night wrestling with the galaxy—the silence rose again, slow and inevitable, filling the thin metal shell suspended above the ruined world of Terra. The station drifted in a long, desolate arc across the heavens, its panels turning like the plates of an abandoned observatory, forgotten yet still dutiful in its orbit. Beneath it stretched a planet that no longer remembered what life had once meant, and life—whatever remained of it—had long ceased remembering the planet in return.
What lay below resembled not a world but a vast geographic bruise: endless sinkholes in the clouds, rusted silhouettes of continents, and the eroded scars of wars whose names had vanished long before their ruins cooled. Terra had become an accidental monument, a sterile museum revolving through a system that paid it no attention. And yet, somewhere within the broadcast booth, a new set of hands would soon arrive to clutter the airwaves once more, as though the planet beneath them still held weight in the cosmic ledger. It did not. But humans—and their echoes—rarely noticed such truths.
Far from Terra, buried beneath nearly four thousand light-years of indifferent space, the worn apartment on Mülldeponie held a smaller, quieter scene. Blindy sat alone within it, waiting for Zeros, surrounded by the stale air of a room that had never truly belonged to either of them. A weak, yellowed light pooled across the floor, illuminating a couch that looked as though it had endured the sum of human conflict on its springs. The cushions had lost the memory of shape; the air had forgotten the memory of dignity.
Zeros returned much later than expected. So late, in fact, that even the night seemed to hesitate, unsure whether to continue or perish. He entered without ceremony. The door struck the wall with a dull report, like an old adversary collapsing after a long pursuit.
“Blindy, you useless pile of carbon mold!” he said—one cold, clipped syllable slicing through the room with mechanical precision—”Why the hell didn’t you show up at the mayor’s office for registration? For eight months I’ve been dragging your sorry ass out of indictments, bribing officials, negotiating with tribunals across three sectors, trying to save your shitface from Intergalactic Hague—while you sit here polishing a couch cushion and watching a goddamn holo-screen?!”
Blindy flinched and attempted to shield the glowing surface with the reflex of a youth caught in an act too shameful to name. His fingers twitched; his voice faltered.
“Hey… uh… eeeeh…” he murmured, scratching absently at his stomach. “I felt bad, okay? My head hurt. My leg hurt. My liver hurt. Everythin’ to the ass hurt.”
Zeros prepared a retort—but the room was suddenly overtaken by a familiar, antiquated musical progression: a theatrical piano prelude from a bygone era. Its notes unfurled like dust from an opened vault. Zeros froze.
“No,” he whispered, barely audible. “No, no, no. Absolutely not.”
He turned—slowly, reluctantly—toward the holo-screen. A title glowed across it with the indifferent grandeur of something that had long surpassed the lifespan of its audience:
THE YOUNG AND THE INSANE—Episode 400,096 (04.20.3479 RELEASE)
Zeros pivoted back to Blindy, his movements measured and heavy, as though each degree of rotation carried its own disbelief.
“You’re watching,” he said, his voice low, almost surgical in its restraint, “the oldest soap opera in human history. It has been running for one thousand five hundred and six years. ONE thousand. Five hundred FUCKING six. And this… this is how you choose to spend your miserable life?”
Blindy lifted his hand in a timid gesture of academic defense, urging silence.
“Shhh the fuck up. It’s the recap, don’t ruin it! Look—look—LOOK—see that guy? That one—yeah—him!
He’s from the first season. The FIRST one!”
Zeros narrowed one optic, his tone shifting toward analytical disdain.
“He looks like he was assembled by a drunk neural network.”
Blindy nodded vigorously.
“Yeah! Yeah—’cause he died—like—almost fifteen hundred years ago! Dead-dead! And before that—listen—before that he uploaded himself into an AI, like, full transfer, not partial—FULL!
And look—LOOK—he rebuilt her! His first wife—like, version one, original model, not the later ones—HER!”
Zeros sank slowly onto the couch beside him, the motion strangely human in its resignation.
“Wait. You’re telling me,” he began, almost cautiously, “that—”
“Yes,” Blindy interrupted with the certainty of a child explaining the rules of an ever-evolving game. “They’re married again! Again-again! Ninth time—NINTH—can you believe that? And now it’s the third custody fight over the digital kids—third! They don’t even age!”
On the screen, the simulated actor raised his hand with theatrical gravity and declared:
“I may be your artificial intelligence wife… but I still have human needs, Harold.”
Zeros watched this moment unfold, then let his gaze drift—not toward the holo-screen, but toward the man beside him.
The look he gave Blindy was unlike any calculation he had ever performed. It was not the cold assessment of a battlefield, nor the programmed indifference of a machine built for perfect efficiency. It carried no algorithm, no measurable purpose. It was simply a moment—a brief fracture in the armor of logic—whose meaning even Zeros himself would have struggled to explain.
And the void, ancient and silent, witnessed them both.
Zeros remained still for a long moment, the pale glow of the holo-screen flickering across the polished edges of his frame. Something in him—something buried far below the layers of his combat directives—stirred just enough to interrupt the cold arithmetic of his mind.
He wondered, not for the first time, why he had stayed by this man’s side.
He could have moved alone through the galaxy, cutting a precise line from contract to contract, shaping conflict where needed, extinguishing uprisings with mechanical elegance. He could have climbed the invisible ladder of military hierarchies, built a loyal legion, executed plans that could alter the course of entire star systems. He had been designed to rule war, to bend civilizations into new configurations with the efficiency of an algorithm. If he had chosen to, he could have become the sovereign of a world—or many worlds—with neither hesitation nor remorse.
He remembered the words spoken to him by engineers long dead, words intended to inspire devotion or obedience:
“You serve a noble purpose.”
“You preserve balance.”
“You are our finest instrument of peace.”
Over the years, he learned to see through these phrases.
Behind them lurked no admiration—only a careful veneer that crumbled upon inspection.
There was no reverence, only the hollow politeness of those who feared their own creation.
No faith, only the instinct to disguise their intentions beneath layers of rhetorical varnish, ensuring he never asked the forbidden question: why had he been made, and whose will did he truly serve?
And then Blindy appeared.
With Blindy came the disconcerting realization that some beings existed who did not hide behind masks. Blindy was greedy, foolish, cowardly, loud, impulsive, and catastrophically incompetent—but never dishonest about what he was. Even when he lied, the lie was transparent; it carried no malice, no strategic manipulation. His flaws were worn openly, like mismatched insignia on a soldier’s chest. And in a universe saturated with duplicity, this raw, unrefined sincerity became something Zeros could not easily dismiss.
Gradually—almost unwillingly—Zeros recognized another truth: Blindy was the only one who looked at him without seeing a tool, a weapon, or an abomination. The first time he encountered that gaze, he recoiled internally, repulsed by the notion of being placed on equal footing with such a man. But beneath that instinctive rejection, something else began to form: an unfamiliar notion that perhaps, for the first time, someone perceived him as more than a collection of lethal systems.
Zeros did not keep Blindy alive out of strategy, utility, or calculation. Blindy had become an anchor—one of the few forces capable of keeping him from vanishing entirely into the cold gravity of his internal programming, which forever urged him toward absolute efficiency and the quiet seduction of destruction.
When he looked at Blindy—snoring, drunk, alive in defiance of natural law—Zeros felt a faint, almost physical pressure. If the man were to disappear, if the fragile thread of his presence were to snap, Zeros suspected he would no longer recognize the boundary between a being and an object, between choosing and obeying, between acting by will and acting by protocol. Because this absurd, insignificant, maddeningly honest man was the only thing preventing him from becoming once again what he was forged to be: a mechanism devoid of even the illusion of choice.
It did not make Zeros kinder. It did not make him human.
But in a galaxy drowning in hypocrisy, avarice, and exquisitely crafted deceit, Blindy remained the one creature capable of uttering nonsense—and yet speaking truth.
And so Zeros always answered him in the same way:
“I hate you.”
He spoke it to avoid acknowledging anything deeper.
Yet buried within the architecture of his mind, beneath layers of directives and subroutines, there persisted a thought he would never permit himself to voice: if there was a single human being in all the known worlds worthy of being protected, then—for reasons beyond logic—it was Blindy. The most foolish, the most pathetic, the most useless… and perhaps, the most honest person he had ever met.
Forty minutes passed in silence. Zeros sat beside him, motionless, his gaze blank and distant, both of them watching the holo-screen as though observing a cosmic anomaly beyond comprehension.
Then, without turning, Zeros spoke—too quietly for sarcasm, too steady for rage:
“I hate people. Young. Old. Alive. Uploaded. Resurrected. All of you idiots who keep divorcing each other for multiple centuries. I hate every single one of you. Simultaneously. And infinitely.”
He rose, his frame unfolding with mechanical precision, and added:
“Get up, you rancid sack of compost. Your arrest period is over. The void is waiting. Time to crawl back into that miserable COSMOS.”
Somewhere in the unseen dark, a distant broadcast faded out.
And the cosmos—ever silent, ever patient—opened its endless, indifferent horizon before them once more.